Sweden Sold Bearings to Both Sides in WW2 — Until America Threatened to Bomb the Factory

In World War II, the humble ball bearing—essential to every tank, aircraft, submarine, and factory machine—became one of the most strategically critical components of the conflict. The world’s largest producer, the Swedish company SKF, sold bearings to both the Allies and Nazi Germany while Sweden maintained official neutrality, constrained by geography and economic dependence. Allied bombing raids on German bearing plants in Schweinfurt in 1943 caused heavy American losses but failed to permanently cripple production, as Germany dispersed manufacturing and relied increasingly on Swedish imports. Ultimately, diplomatic and financial pressure—backed by threats to blacklist Swedish assets and even bomb factories in Göteborg—forced SKF to drastically reduce exports to Germany in 1944. The episode revealed that modern industrial warfare depended not just on oil or weapons, but on small precision components, and that economic coercion combined with military force proved more decisive than bombing alone.